Criticism To Unsheepify + Unlithify Humanity
I watched David Bowie‘s music video for The Next Day on YouTube last night.
Wanting to know what all the fuss was about, I deliberately set the video quality to HD and waited patiently for the ten minutes it took to load on my pathetic rural far North Queensland broadband connection.
I was not disappointed. In fact, I was bloody impressed. {I was also blown away by the absolute coolness of Gary Oldman. Drools. LOL}
Photo by @x1brett
At this point in time, I’m describing myself as a critic. I’ve stated my reasons why before but now, two months on, I would like to offer an update on my understanding of my current chosen direction.
To me, being a critic is a personal journey, an exploration and experimentation of how I think, expressed to the public as an exercise in discipline of expression.
Photo by @happeningfish
Some say that humans are driven by the search for meaning. Others say it is happiness. Yet others say it is purpose.
I believe in diversity. I also believe that it doesn’t matter what others are looking for, or what others believe humanity is searching for.
For someone who deals in matters of the abstract, I have to agree that sometimes sometimes abstract questions dealing with the collective are meaningless to the individual.
I have my own ideas of what ‘we’ are searching for.
I was watching Amy Winehouse on YouTube tonight. I watched her interview and performance at Dingle {which is sadly missing the fourth part} and I watched her very last live performance at Belgrade.
I read the comments on both videos.
I remember reading the comments back in 2011 and 2010, in the year before she died. They were horrible. People were tearing her down. I looked at her then. The photos that came out online, the videos of her disastrous concerts.
And I felt. So. Angry.
Today, the majority of the comments are things like, “So sad. Great talent lost. Will miss her,” etc. Where were these people and their comments and their compassion when she really needed it?
Greetings, greetings. I write to you from my mattress here in Cooya Beach in far north Queensland. The air is crisp for this time and location and my thoughts are still foggy.
Perplexingly, nothing showed up in my pathology tests. My doctor’s guess is that I was already over the worst of the infection by the time I went in for the tests, as I had already had an injection and started on a course of antibiotics.
Bed rest has been exceedingly boring and fruitful all at once.
Please pardon the nervous tics. Yes, I was nervous. I have no idea why I hate recording in front of a camera so much. It’s bad to the point I tend to lose track of what I’m saying because I’m struggling so badly with my nervousness.
My very simplistic representation of my philosophy and passion.
Quick update to let everyone know that I’ve been knocked out for the past two weeks by either dengue {again} or leptospirosis. Doctor couldn’t figure it out. Still waiting for blood and urine test results.
All we know at the moment is that it’s definitely related to the massive bout of illness I had in March. No wonder I’d been feeling like I just couldn’t pick myself up properly since.
Travellers to the far north beware: Please be sure to treat all water from the taps before drinking. Boil, filter, iodine, whatever. The water from Mossman and upwards isn’t chlorinated. I only found out this week. {face palm}
Haven’t been able to blog at all. So many things I wanted to write about recently, with so much happening, but just haven’t been able to muster up the energy. Oh I love fatigue and brain fog. Old friends, you know?
Anyway, am feeling slightly better on antibiotics now. Hope to be back soon!
Photo by @keankelly
In 2009, I paid a ridiculously handsome sum of money for three months of once weekly telephone coaching.
I won’t disclose the name of the company or the coach. Needless to say, it was useless, though you would have had to have me at gun point to admit that then. I was so blind, so hopelessly sold on the ideals of the personal development movement. I was a pathetic sheep. Baa!
I was going through my email archives today, looking for some old emails, when I came across an email I wrote to an old acquaintance. We were discussing the law of attraction and I quoted my coach, who had told me during my last coaching call, “Comfort is overrated.”
Photo by @publicenergy
There’s something many beginners to creative work, like myself, tend to overlook or choose to ignore completely.
When it comes to physical work, we expect limits to physical endurance. We accept the need to rest, repair and recuperate. We respect the reality of physical burnout.
However, I suspect there are many of us who refuse the acknowledge the reality of inspirational burnout.
The most important things are the hardest to say.
They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out.
But it’s more than that, isn’t it?
The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away.
And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it.
That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear.
— Stephen King
Photo by @notionscapital
An ongoing discovery and expression of our fluxing realisation of self.
You. Me. Everyone. Your blog is your shared and public expression of who you are and why. Not your product, not your service. Not your monetization strategy.
All we have to do now, is take these lies,
And make them true somehow.
All we have to see is that I don’t belong to you,
And you don’t belong to me.
Yeah, yeah!
Freedom, freedom, freedom!
You’ve gotta give for what you take.
Freedom, freedom, freedom!
You’ve gotta give for what you take.
— George Michael, Freedom ’90
When Ursula appears in a dream, it is usually to stir things up.
“There are two kinds of people,” she once decreed to me emphatically.
“One kind, you can tell just by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a very nice self, but you know you can expect no more surprises from it.
Whereas, the other kind keep moving, changing.
With these people, you can never say, ‘X stops here,’ or, ‘Now I know all there is to know about Y.’
That doesn’t mean they’re unstable. Ah, no, far from it.
They are fluid.
They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life, and the motion of it keeps them young.
In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive.”
— Ursula DeVane, The Finishing School by Gail Godwin
via Mystic Medusa, Mars In Saggo Perspective
Photo by @lrargerich
I read Edenland with great… Well I wouldn’t say devotion, that sounds a little creepy. {okay. a little more than creepy} Let’s just say that I do keep a watchful eye out for any new material from Eden Riley.
I saw the new post in Google Reader today and I clicked through with great anticipation. It wasn’t Eden, however. It was Linda, posting on Eden’s behalf.
I was worried. I was. I wondered if Eden was alright. It is amazing, I know, to think that I should be concerned about a complete stranger. After all, what do I know about her bar what she writes on her blog?
Acerbic criticism of humanity is used as a taser to disrupt emotional, intellectual, philosophical and spiritual comfort zones.
Creating the uncomfortable conditions required for genuine change and independent thought in humans.
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